When it comes to the long-term success of stand-alone “check-in” services like Foursquare, Gowalla and Booyah, it’s all about incentives.
Sure, a few hundred-thousand early adopters might find social value in sharing their location with the world. But in order for checking-in to go mainstream, these companies will have to offer users a compelling answer to the question “Why?”
Foursquare is inching towards a meaningful response with a bevy of partnerships, including its latest promotion with Starbucks.
Starting today, Foursquare users who become the “mayor” of a Starbucks (that means checking-in more than anyone else at a given location), will receive a coupon for $1 off a Frappuccino. It’s a small gesture, but a meaningful one to the legion of caffeine addicts looking for a novel way to engage with their favourite brand.
While the New York-based company has signed deals with the likes of The History Channel, VH1 and The Today Show to offer users special “badges”, this is among Foursquare’s first real coupon promotions. And it will likely be the allure of discounts that drives mass adoption.
Foursquare still has not taken a major round of funding, but is rumoured to be in talks with venture capitalists. Talk of an acquisition by Yahoo has quieted down, too. But the service is still gaining users and adoption, recently surpassing 600,000 check-ins a day.
Meanwhile, rival Booyah just took$20m from Accel, and Gowalla continues refining its service. Yelp has launched its check-in service, Google Buzz had location built-in, and Facebook’s location feature — which many consider the automatic winner in the category given Facebook’s nearly half billion users — is imminent.
But Foursquare’s deal with Starbucks points to an inconvenient truth about scaling a check-in service: for check-ins to have real value, they need to be incentivised. And real incentives come through partnerships laboriously hashed out by a strong biz dev team.
That means it’s going to take more than snappy engineers, pretty badges, or even tons of users, for a company to win the war for check-ins. It’s going to take a strong salesforce that can offer users lots and lots of coupons and making checking-in worth their while.
